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Women work without a break for their families, society, and friends all through the year. So, on IWD 2016, LEAD conducted their 3rd annual "Recognizing the Unrecognized", where women in our society who are rarely recognized but are responsible for important work were recognized for their contributions, such as cleaning railway stations, bus stands, picking household trash, selling vegetables etc. LEAD and LEADers believe that, without these women, our communities would come to a standstill.

The youth of today are the leaders of tomorrow. To that purpose, the LEaders Accelerating Development (LEAD) Program of the Deshpande Foundation was born. LEAD develops innovative and entrepreneurial thinking within college students by exposing them to social issues, encouraging them to volunteer their time and effort into the community, and igniting their latent talent to come up with creative solutions. Through this unique platform provided by LEAD, students are gaining the skills and confidence needed to transform their visions into realities. Armed with guidance, exposure, networking opportunities, financial assistance, and encouragement from LEAD, students from throughout 75 colleges and 14 districts are unleashing their leadership potential to go on inspiring and improving those around them.

The 6th Yuva Summit, an international youth conference on leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship hosted by the Leaders Accelerating Development program, began in Hubballi on 6th February with Mr. Ravindranath Gumaste, Managing Director of Kirloskar Ferrous Industries Ltd., cutting the ceremonial ribbon that let the hundreds of attendees, including students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and honoured guests, into the event grounds.

On 24th January, 107 promising students from across Karnataka and neighbouring states descended upon the VTU campus in Belagavi to mark the kick-off of the 5th annual LEAD Prayana. These students, along with 32 beginning their journey on the same day in Nizamabad, were selected from a pool of almost 500 applicants. LEAD Prayana, which began in 2012 with just 63 students, is an annual leadership journey that takes almost 150 passionate students between the ages of 18-26 throughout India on a 14-day tour across Karnataka...

I am passionate about science, especially physics. My affair with Science started during my childhood and it deepened in my high school when I started participating in Science exhibitions with my models. During Pre University Education, I built the Levitation Train with few of my friends and grabbed prizes at several competitions. “Physics of the Impossible” by Michio Kaku was a book that exposed me further to the vastness of the science and motivated me to start a science group called “Blackbody Science Group (Which Absorbs All Wavelength of Intuitive Minds)”. This group engages in creating interest about science among government and physically disabled school children.

The main intention behind this event
was to appreciate the sincere and hard work being done by all the working women.
These workers work their socks off through sweat and pain to keep the campus
kempt and clean. People who visit our campus are astonished by the beauty of the campus and regard our campus as the best campus in Maharashtra, let alone in
Pune.

All the credit goes to the women staff for this. So to acknowledge them,
to make them feel wanted, we planned this event. Seeing their joyful faces we can
confidently say that the event was a huge success. The token of gift from our
side was a rose, a mask and gloves, keeping in mind about the dust and filth
which they have to clean.

The event was planned on short notice
and therefore we only had one day to plan, organise and collect funds which was
strictly from all the students, those who came forward appreciated the noble
idea behind it. We managed to get permission for booking the hall in our
campus. The event basically commenced with the speech by the head of the campus
in-charge followed by a short documentary and finally a classical dance by one
of our team mates.

Only thing we would like to say is that this
was simple idea which we managed to showcase successfully and we believe many
more such simple ideas are needed to bring about a better change to the
society.